I’ve finally updated the Facebook Privacy & Security Guide to version 3.0. This is a major revision which includes directions on how to set the latest privacy and security controls in Facebook. Maintaining this guide has been challenging over the last year as Facebook has made major changes multiple times in regards to the way privacy settings are enabled. Having said that, this is a great time to use my guide and review what your privacy settings are. Things like enabling secure browsing, login approvals and limiting the audience to what you post are more important then ever.

As always, feel free to distribute this guide to friends and family! Happy Thanksgiving!

As I have been testing the security settings of companies social media strategies, I have consistently noticed two things, marketing is desperately trying to find its ROI and IT/Security doesn’t even know they have a FB page. I do agree that after a number of months, it is time to show the CFO that spending that insame amount of time on their social media sites is worth the payroll checks. Unfortunately, analytics alone have been a blurry way of making that compelling argument and can be defeated by saying, if, I had put those payroll checks into google…I could see our ROI in a nice neat report. This is one of the reasons that marketing is jumping head first into technologies like Shoutlet, payvment or others (FB E-commerce). Why not sell your items on your FB Page? Your team has worked extremely hard to get thousands of new users to click follow/like. Ultimately, this is going to be the future of pages but because IT/Security is not involved in the social media process it also opens a HUGE GAPPING HOLE in your security policy and procedures. And of course here is your example:

The policy of company ACME is “no social networking allowed” on internal networks. Sites are being blocked at the firewall with rules and enforced with a content filtering tool. IT/Security has done its job with social media, right? BUT an exception is made for Marketing because they are special people. A FB page was created as well as an E-Commerce app installed without consulting IT/Security. I know this because after taking over the FB page using our friends Cain and Able, I replaced just one of the “buy now” buttons to redirect it my site and used analytics to see how many people clicked this button. Showing this to Director of IT he replied “I didn’t even know we had a FB Page.”

Part 2

After this meeting we agreed to stop and allow IT/ Security to be a part of the implementation of this new e-com solution and lock down this new site. After a couple of months we were given the green light that all social media was secure and our attacks would now #fail. Well they were wrong! Here is what happened; Technology constantly changes and therefor we should also be constantly training/testing these changes. Yes, all https was checked. Yes, they read www.socialmediasecurity.com on a regular basis. But they forgot to monitor their social media accounts like they would an email server. There is still a core failure in my opinion of Facebook pages. Who?!? owns the data and when is it okay to monitor the admins personal accounts? Because these users of the pages still enjoy using Facebook for personal use. They do not apply the corporate rules to their personal accounts nor should they if that is how they live. So, we are either forced to create fake accounts or all share one admin account. Well with our testing we are still targeting the admins of these pages. There are many many ways to gain access to their accounts and once in, we only have to create our own evil twin account to keep access. Example: if Bob Alice is the admin of the page just create another Bob Alice and copy the information including the profile imagine and allow this new user admin rights to the page. Most common users will just think this is a Facebook glitch and it is showing their profile twice. But in reality it is a way for us to keep a constant admin account to this system. If you maintain a Facebook page you know that admins just lose their rights to the page all the time out of the blue. So constantly adding the same person is a regular process. If the company was monitoring its data it would see these changes or see that there were in fact 2 different accounts attached to this page. But we are not monitoring these accounts, yet. Social media security can be a full time job depending on the risk and frequency of the sites. For more information feel free as always to email me. info@unixbox.ws

This is the 26th episode of the Social Media Security Podcast recorded September 8, 2011. This episode was hosted by Tom Eston and Scott Wright. Below are the show notes, links to articles and news mentioned in the podcast:

Please send any show feedback to feedback [aT] socialmediasecurity.com or comment below. You can also call our voice mail box at 1-613-693-0997 if you have a question for our Q&A section on the next episode. You can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunesand follow us on Twitter. Thanks for listening!

Kevin Johnson and Tom Eston gave the third and final “Social Zombies” talk at Notacon 8 this weekend. This talk focused on how social networks are using geolocation and the abuse of location based services.

“Social networks have jumped onto the geolocation bandwagon with location-based tweets, status updates, check-ins, mayorships, and more. This doesn’t take into account EXIF, QR codes, and advancements in HTML 5 geo implementations, which are being built into these location-based services. This is often implemented and enabled without the user even knowing it. In fact, geolocation is one of the hottest technologies being used in everything from web browsers to mobile devices. As social networks throw our location coordinates around like candy, its only natural that bad things will happen and abuse will become more popular. This presentation will cover how social networks and other websites are currently using location-based services, what they plan on doing with it, and a discussion on the current privacy and security issues. We will also discuss the latest geolocation hacking techniques and will release custom code that can abuse all of the features being discussed.”

This is the 19th episode of the Social Media Security Podcast recorded October 8, 2010. This episode was hosted by Tom Eston and Scott Wright. Below are the show notes, links to articles and news mentioned in the podcast:

Please send any show feedback to feedback [aT] socialmediasecurity.com or comment below. You can also call our voice mail box at 1-613-693-0997 if you have a question for our Q&A section on the next episode. You can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunesand follow us on Twitter. Thanks for listening!

This is the 15th episode of the Social Media Security Podcast recorded June 11th, 2010. This episode was hosted by Tom Eston and Scott Wright. Below are the show notes, links to articles and news mentioned in the podcast:

Please send any show feedback to feedback [aT] socialmediasecurity.com or comment below. You can also call our voice mail box at 1-613-693-0997 if you have a question for our Q&A section on the next episode. You can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. Thanks for listening!